1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a document production system and the like for providing easy production of a document with an illustration or vignette.
2. Related Art of the Invention
Recently, home fax machines have spring into wide use to increase fax communications for purposes other than business. In addition, personal computers and PDAs(portable digital assistance) facilitate transmission or reception of fax data. These devices permit documents produced by users to be readily transmitted to others. However, handwritten documents without illustration or documents containing only text produced by means of the personal computer or the like are prosaic and dull, far from grabbing someone's attention. Hence, a demand exists for a technique of permitting a simple operation to add illustrations or the like to the documents.
An image production system offering such a technique has been proposed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 6(1994)-54165. This system includes, as shown in FIG. 38, an image data input section 201 for optically reading an image of a manuscript, a paint menu setting section 202 for setting a type and the like of an image to be superimposed, a paint address setting section 203 for specifying a position of the image to be superimposed, a data synthesizing section 204 for combining the manuscript image and the image to be superimposed, and an image output section 205 for outputting a composite image.
With such an arrangement, the image production system permits a user to select a suitable image, such as an illustration, and to specify a position of the image to be combined with the manuscript image read by a scanner or the like, so as to superimpose the illustration and the manuscript image on the specified places for outputting the resultant composite image.
In the image production system of Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 6-54165, however, the user is responsible for all the process of selecting the image to be superimposed, such as an illustration, and specifying the layout of the document, thus going through all the cumbersome operations. Hence, it is not easy for everyone to produce a document with an illustration added thereto.
Hence, a demand exists for a document production method and system which require the user of substantially no operation for producing documents wherein illustrations are added to inputted manuscript. There also exists a need for an effective inference scheme for accomplishing such intellectual and complicated operations.